Doesn’t like 90% of Mozilla’s funding come from Google? At least expanding their paid services could be seen as trying to turn that around.
The anti-monopoly lawsuit against Google fixed that
Now Mozilla has to find a way to offset that loss, which would be attracting the non-Firefox market
Nice! Good for them.
From my understanding thunbird is somewhat separated from this. From the article linked by OP it says:
What’s crystal clear is that Thunderbird’s ever-increasing donation revenue (currently its sole source of income) is allowing for some explosive growth that’s long overdue. To add some context to this, Thunderbird received $2.8 million in donation revenue during 2021. Two years later, in 2023, it received $8.6 million in donations. I’m told that total financial contributions for 2024 were even higher, though the final amount hasn’t been officially released.
I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app. Glad things seem to be working out.
If this works out it might be a nice place to migrate to away from my self-hosted e-mail provided they eventually let you bring your own domain. Just sucks that e-mail is essentially the most secure thing you need to have since compromising that can compromise every account attached to the e-mail. That’s a lot of trust you need to instill in your e-mail host.
I have fond memories of self-hosting a qmail setup for a long time, then eventually migrating to a postfix configuration, back in the day.
Keeping up with spam filtering finally did me in.
The spam filtering is painful. I kinda work around it by giving a unique e-mail for everything and of one starts getting spammed I just rid of that e-mail. Tends to give you advance warning of data breaches too since you’ll start seeing the spam come in before the announcement.
You say you’re self hosting your email, how are you doing that?
I meant hosting wise, at home or using a VPS? How did you get a fixed IP/ what are you using for a proxy?
VPS, I wouldn’t run a mail server from my home network. If you go with mailinabox you don’t need to set up a proxy, it’s pretty simple.
It’s a colocated server. I provided the physical server and they put it into a rack in a datacenter with power and networking (static IP).
Whatever their doing, it’s not worth it.
Eh it depends. I’m fortunate enough to be in a good IP block so I don’t get my e-mails dropped purely on that. It’s been a good learning experience and I’ve leaned on my own server a number of times for troubleshooting at work since I can see the whole mail flow. The only problem I have is the free Outlook/Hotmail will not accept my e-mails. Everybody else seems fine. All that said, I don’t host anybody else’s e-mail so I haven’t had any spam come out of my IP, and I would never in a million years host e-mail for a customer.
No matter how much I hate Mozilla’s new path, companies like this challenging big tech are bold and have a lot of courage. If I set aside my personal op opinions about Mozilla, I actually admire them for this. They can actually dent big tech with funding from big tech itself.
For now, they’re better than Google. I have some bad opinions about them, but anything better than Google competing with Google is an improvement.
Yeah it’s not even close.
…and then join the big tech at some point.
I keep hearing a lot of negative comments about Mozilla lately. I’m wondering if this move is more in line with then just turning into another google rather than disrupting the marketplace.
yeah, might seem good to have yet another choice, but it’s an illusion
If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.
different, yes. but by how much and will it be different in ways that truly matter
yes but this takes time. its great to have alternatives in the meantime.
Google only checked out and cashed in after getting a monopoly. Mozilla let themselves fade into irrelevance.
It’s a saturated market and email is starting to disappear (it’ll take years, but the signs are there).
They’d be better using it on the browser and ditching other products.Email won’t disappear sooner or later. It’s a huge part of communication between companies, nonprofit, state, etc. It may be less between people or with consumers. But, it still is widely use otherwise.
No its never going to disappear. If you are referring to people using slack and chat apps, those are locked in walled gardens where your messages cant ever leave.
Email can be moved anywhere easily.
On top of that, people still use email to sign up for these gardens. Technically, you could use your phone number too. I wonder how far could you take this idea of living completely without email.
Job applications, and several other sign ins still depend on email, so that’s going to be a bit of a hitch.
Yeah and then we can really go hard destroying the lives of people without phone access.
I work for a healthcare company that serves the under privileged and right now in most cities it’s easier to guarantee someone has email than a consistent phone number thanks to free WiFi hotspots. You can miss a phone payment and still read your email even if you’re cut off from cellular service.
Oh, that’s a very good point! Makes you look at this proposal in a completely different way.
I’m curious, not bashing. What signs have you seen that lead you to believe email is dying?
It’s insecure by default and Kids These Days™ prefer messaging apps, which have boomed in the last decade.
Time will tell.What do you make of the use of email in the business world? You’re right that quite a bit of that has turned into instant messaging as well, ie I text my boss instead of sending them mail but it definitely feels like that’s going away a lot slower if not expanding
Email is a must for between businesses. Having said that, lots of internal communication is findingther channels, like Teams, Slack, and so on.
We actually heavily rely on connected channels to talk to most of our vendors now. Once you are on enterprise level support pretty much every vendor gives you a dedicated slack or teams channel.
It’s great since people come and go and we don’t lose our vendor comms history in random inboxes or have someone not CCd on. Any vendor we have linked is also one less vendor someone is likely to be phished talking to the wrong person on the wrong email. For support tickets there’s no wrapping and encrypting shit steps to send critical info over email, we use the slack channel. It really solves a lot of BS
So… Exactly how it was 20 years ago. Kids Those Days used AIM and Yahoo Messenger instead of slack and discord.
Any business2business or consumer2business communication will likely still happen over email for a very long time
Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s the ipv4 of communication. You can list 100 things bad about it and none of it matters, too many things are now built on top of it, no competitor can possibly have a chance without first reimplementing email, and then they’re just adding extensions which everyone else ignores, and email continues.
The more plausible threat to email is that it gets siloed into the top 5 or 6 providers and everyone else gets filtered out as spam (ie you need gmail, hotmail, etc or your emails will never reach anyone)
The big providers problem is already true, but DMARC and DKIM mitigated that problem.
email is starting to disappear
The fuck it is lol, do you have any idea how much email is used in literally everything? How old are you?
Lol sure destroy all the trust with your users THEN launch an email service. Hard pass fro me.
I guarantee you they’re already planning to train an LLM on everybody’s emails, or at least sell them to AI companies doing training.
I have a 20ish year old history in my Gmail account organized in labels and all that. I wonder if it will be viable to migrate?
Considering labels are very non-standard, which caused trouble over IMAP since forever, I wouldn’t count on that part.
Labels are displayed as folders on IMAP, which means that a single message could appear in multiple folders. Are there any other problems you’re talking about?
One of the problems that annoyed me in the past is the complexity and ambiguity of deleting an email over IMAP. Depending on whether it’s the last label of the deleted email, deleting an email from a label’s directory either removes a label from this email, or actually deletes the email.
Please archive shit. It’s OK to save old data, but not on the service. There are ways. Even banks, the most obsessive and legally strapped data hoarders keep their 5+ year old data in deep cold storage, away from the active services. 99.9^% of information that old won’t be looked at by anyone.
Not true.
It’s much easier to keep old data in active storage where it can be classified, searched, and have retention/deletion policies applied. Moving it elsewhere makes it more likely you’ll just hang onto it forever while not using it at all.
When was the last time you had to find a 20 year old email? Share your anecdotes.
Edit: I’m not being snarky, there are legitimate and more functional solutions.
Warranty… Some are 15-20 years, but you need proof of purchase docs, which are often emailed data.
Why not having an archive of exclusively warranties? Emails can be downloaded, indexed and compressed. I agree on keeping archives of old stuff. But emails used as cloud drives are a huge problem for IT and security reasons. A legal folder is better and facilitates backup, encryption and much more accessibility.
I don’t disagree that you should set up retention policies to delete old email, I disagree that you should remove old emails from primary service/storage.
I actually did need a 15 year old email a few months ago. I don’t recall what I needed, but I then set up a retention policy to delete old stuff.
I’m listening…
But how is a small non-profit going to afford a free email service? Ads in every email?
Based on what I’ve seen in their forums it will be a paid service. I think it will be free at first for beta testers but I assume they are targeting people who currently use services like Proton.
Thanks for the info.
But I think they’ll still need an ad driven free version to gain acceptance.
So the Mozilla Foundation is gonna waste google money on email infrastructure? Hmmm… 'k… it’s not like their browser could use some love…
are you implying firefox is in a state of neglect?
I personally would love profiles akin to how Chrome does it.
Edit: a word
No there yet but not getting the love it deserved either.
Maybe they oughta try asking for money like Wikipedia and KDE, maybe then they could become independent from Google and focus on actually developing a quality browser instead of making every app be about profit.You’re making no sense.
Thunderbird’s corp (MZLA) does not get Google money so far as i’m aware. It is a different subsidiary corp from Firefox’s Mozilla Corp.
Sounded great until the “assist” ai feature. I friggin hate Gemini in gmail so any other kind of ai is an automatic nogo for me
I’d consider it. If they host things outside of the US/start moving operations overseas, it’d be a lot more interesting. I sub to Proton for email, VPN, and drive support. Still hoping someday for proper Linux drive support so Mozilla/Thunderbird can target that
welp I signed up for the waitlist.
I’ll use it for a disposable email at first, and if it endures and does well I’ll move my main shit off to it.
I think it’s incredibly important that people know, with absolute certainty, whether or not the new Mozilla/Firefox privacy policy in any way applies to / covers such a service.
I’m not saying I know the answer- What I’m saying without a concrete, permanently applied answer it’s not even considerable.
There is no email service that exists without a terms of use and privacy policy. I still feel everyone overreacted about Firefox. It’s funnier how many people said they switched to Brave because of it and all the super shady stuff Brave has done.
Firefox/Mozilla operated without any of the new additions for nearly the entire history of the internet until this year. If anything, “over”-reacting to the new policies was too weak a reaction. You do you and all, but I’ll agree to very strongly disagree.
at exists without a terms of use and privacy policy. I still feel everyone overreacted about Firefox. It’s funnier how many people said they switched to Brave because of it and all the super shady stuff Brave has done.
Being angry at the Mozilla foundation for those changes is understandable. Switching to Brave because of it is plain stupid.
I do think the brave devs or teams starting spreading the “switch to brave” as a growth hack. No right minded person would pick brave over ff. Maybe librewolf sure.
What is it that you’re concerned about? Assume that I have no idea what either the new or old Mozilla privacy policy is, please. I tend to assume that all such are a pack of lies and everything is spying on me.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-firefox-i-loved-is-gone-how-to-protect-your-privacy-on-it-now/
That article says it better than I can in s short post. Firefox’s terms of use/privacy policy went over like a lead balloon last month.
Thanks for the link.
You can’t know that with absolute certainty. Sorry, but if you’re using someone elses server for your communications and they’re not end to end encrypted, you should just assume that they can and do read your emails, and act accordingly.
Mine is E2EE.
Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.
Here’s what I want… I leave a computer on at home and it checks my email. I get emails from it at my phone. No setup. Make it work like Sinkthing used to work. I don’t want cloud anything. Fucking backup nightmare where my shit ends up kidnapped by a company for monthly ransom.
Sooo… where will be your email server then? On your home computer?
At home but separate computer with reverse proxy.
Oh You will have trouble getting your outbound mail delivered
if it’s anything like gmail, they’d offer imap so you can set it up in thunderbird and download your messages locally.
Syncthing still works like that. It’s completely self hostable. I have it on a pi 1B+ lol
I have it but it eats up battery on the phones and the Dev left so it’s probably going to go caput at some point.
Check out the fork on fdroid
I know there’s a fork. I’m hoping it picks up devs from where its at. It works beautifully.
That fork is what the Syncthing devs recommend. Pretty sure it’s fine.
You really need to clarify your comment, as it’s already causing confusion.
- The official Syncthing project is going strong, and is not the same thing as the Android app.
- The Android app was discontinued late last year due to Google’s increasingly difficult requirements to publish on the Play Store.
- Syncthing-Fork is now what Syncthing recommends for Android users.
Aw man, I really love syncthing, especially across my computers/backup server at home. I don’t even know what I’d use instead
Syncthing isn’t going anywhere. The Android app is the only thing that was dropped, and that was only because of Google’s increasingly-difficult requirements to publish on the Play Store.
Syncthing-Fork is the spiritual successor to the original Android app and can be found on F-Droid.
I was thinking ab this being april fool bcz it’s posted on 1st…
Google announced Gmail on April 1
I looked at this but it asked me to download it. Can I access it through a browser like I can Google?
